These days, it’s hard to write positive messages while seeing all the disastrous events happening right outside of our doors. Every time I open Facebook, I close it with goose bumps all over my body. Nevertheless, there is a lot of great stuff happening too, and it’s especially my friends who are doing marvellous, inspiring projects that I would love to introduce to you today. To briefly explain the situation: after a month of not publishing any newsletters, I still cannot bring myself to writing anything but the articles I am paid to write or the monthly wrap-ups I publish to reflect on the accomplished work of the previous month. But that also calls for a small step. And so here is mine: a selection of projects of the people I admire for the work they do. I hope you enjoy their work as much as I do:

Anne is currently working on launching a coding school, Refugees on Rails, that will help refugees find jobs in an industry where there aren’t enough workers to take on these tasks.

Talia’s beautiful jewellery that was produced in collaboration with J. & L. Lobmeyr is now available for sale. Also, here are her thoughts on the current refugee situation from a designer’s perspective. Worth a read.

Launching a business is a big deal; deciding on the name of your company, what logo to use, and how to communicate your services or show your products. Often, once the website is up, one hardly ever takes a look at it again. But then, just like spring cleaning should be done once in a while, so should the digital cleaning spree happen every now and then. In other words, you should know what people think of your business based on what you show to them on your website. You should regularly look through what you say your services are, your latest references, reflect, and you should regularly check whether your company’s profile mirrors what benefits you deliver to your clients.

Just like people, businesses evolve too, and thus it’s important to keep track of how people perceive your business every time they google you. Your website is your chance to make sure people find the right information about your services, know what to book you for and know how to best contact you.

A couple of months ago, I was lucky to be invited to shape taliaYstudio’s digital appearance. The studio produces amazing work, yet nevertheless, in the past, they had faced a glass wall when communicating to potential clients. While talking to the founder Talia Radford and looking over their online appearance, several things occurred to me. First, their website was a portfolio of work the studio had previously created. It was setup just like a student portfolio where one demonstrates the work without communicating the benefits the project delivered to the clients. When planning the content of your website, you should first consider who your target group is and what you want them to do after they’ve discovered your site on the internet. In the case of taliaYstudio, the aim was to clarify to potential clients what they could hire the studio for and why they’re the best choice.

We scheduled a series of meetings to work on taliaYstudio's communications strategy; first, we asked ourselves what clients the studio is interested in working with because it’s much easier to find the right clients when you know who they are and how they could benefit from your work. It’s important to know how to respond when people ask you what your services are.

During our strategy sessions, it quickly became clear to us that Talia and her team are enthusiastic about technological innovation and they like to help innovative clients communicate the benefits of their developments through design. A perfect example is the project Thermobooth, which taliaYstudio developed for OSRAM to showcase the potentials of OLEDs in the consumer sector.

Following our analysis, the next step for us was to change the way taliaYstudio’s products and services are being communicated on their website. You’ll notice it’s all about the benefits for the client, and it’s clear what you could book the studio for and if your company can find use in taliaYstudio's services.

Looking through the portfolio of taliaYstudio’s past projects also gave us the chance to look at different ways to use social media to communicate about past and future projects. For example, we identified a way to better utilise Instagram to spread the word about the studio’s Jelly Series, for which we have developed a shareable online and offline communications strategy. Generally speaking, when working on a strategy for social media, you need to think about how you could give people incentives to take a picture of, or at least talk about, your product. For physical objects, the best way to market them is by cleverly utilising the packaging. To give you a practical example, the Jelly Series necklaces now come with a photo mission and the studio regularly organises little gatherings to learn more about the people they address with their work.

The grand finale of our collaboration with taliaYstudio was the Salone di Mobile 2015 in Milano where the studio could practice their new communications strategy on potential clients. The excited call about the results that I’ve received afterwards testifies the positive results achieved by a little time we took to reflect on the business Talia wishes to run. I am glad I could facilitate the reflection process and help build a new digital strategy for the studio. If you need help with your digital appearance, please don’t hesitate and get in touch.

March was exceptionally good. I had the chance to work with taliaYstudio and help them revamp their entire communication strategy. Funny how it seems to be an almost impossible task to confront oneself and look at the communication of one’s company objectively. Sometimes, help’s needed, which is why Talia Radford hired me for a month of intensive consulting. Together, with Talia and Catalina from the collaborative studio, we had a series of workshops to figure out the positioning, messaging, and branding of the company. You can see parts of our efforts here.

In March, Raven & Finch has launched the first issue of Sonor, their agency’s magazine on sound branding. I feel lucky for having had the chance to materialise Max Kickinger’s thoughts and write the copy for the digital and the print issue of the quarterly paper. Sound experience design and sound branding are topics many brands haven’t discovered for themselves just yet. I highly recommend to every brand manager to sign up for their mailing list to receive the next issues.

I must say, I’m really glad I realised #TYWBD. Not only because I loved seeing all the pictures from people who have received one of the books funded through Kickstarter (here, here, here) but also because I’ve signed a contract to work on a very exciting project together with the Kickstarter team. Thus, I’ll be busy for the next three months and only available for small requests.

So, like I said, March was great, and it led to such wonderful opportunities that I’m thankful for.Keep me in the loop on the things you’re working on!